


But Mr Mistoffelees Has No Tail

by fictionalcandie



Category: Inception (2010), Lackadaisy
Genre: Canon Crossover, Gen, Pre-Slash, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-05
Updated: 2012-09-05
Packaged: 2017-11-13 14:45:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/504636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fictionalcandie/pseuds/fictionalcandie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They say every cat has nine lives. Arthur's beginning to think maybe this one is not his first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But Mr Mistoffelees Has No Tail

“St. Louis,” Eames says abruptly, breaking off his speech about… something psychological, the id or the super ego or internalized whatever… and looking around Arthur’s dreamscape as if with new, knowing eyes. “Isn’t it?”

“What,” says Arthur, looking around as well. The place isn’t anything he constructed deliberately, just let it drift up from his subconscious. After all, they’re only down here for Eames to provide Arthur with demonstrations to go with his new theory about who he should be forging to get at the mark, and that doesn’t require any specific architectural elements.

Arthur doesn’t notice anything particularly interesting about their surroundings. What’s so special about a train station? “Eames, come on.”

But Eames is nodding to himself, like Arthur hasn’t spoken; he’s answering his own question. “Yes, it is. It’s Union Station. As was, of course.”

Arthur gives him a blank look.

“Aren’t you clever,” Arthur says after a moment, because he’s discovered that sometimes, if he hands Eames a compliment in a flat enough voice, Eames takes it for insult and explains himself. Often in excruciating detail, but it’s a reasonably palatable tradeoff.

Eames’s mouth curves up, ludicrously plush. “It took me a moment, I’ll admit. It not being that unholy cross between a tourist mall and a museum that it is now threw me off. But those train engines I hear beneath us— you’ve done it up in its glory days.”

“Glory days, really,” says Arthur.

“Once the largest and busiest railway station in North America,” says Eames. He looks smug, the way he always does when he gets to show off that he knows something he has no business knowing. “But then, apparently you were already aware of that.”

“Mm,” says Arthur, and nothing else; he _hadn’t_ been aware. He’s never heard of Union Station, St. Louis. He’s never been to St. Louis, either.

He’s not even sure where it _is_.

Eames is wandering away, their task in the dream apparently forgotten.— Which of course it isn’t, not really, because Eames never forgets. Not like Arthur, whose only unusual cognitive skill is remembering things that _aren’t real_.

“There’s also a hotel there now. Rubbish service, if you make the mistake of wearing a Chicago Cubs baseball cap when you check in. Especially during the playoffs. Have you put in that funny whispering arch?” Eames calls back, over the noise of a train whistle from somewhere deeper inside the building.

(Apparently, Arthur has.)

* * *

The first time they met, Eames was — for reasons beyond Arthur — sporting a goatee and pretending to be an Austrian thug, down to the accent and the stoic near-silence. He looked and sounded so familiar that it made Arthur itch between his shoulder blades, made him want to straighten a pair of spectacles that he didn’t wear and had never needed.

Twice during that job, Arthur had almost called him by a name that wasn’t any of Eames’s, not even the aliases Arthur’d discovered during his standard, exhaustive background check.

The final night of the job, Arthur has his last natural dream — and it’s far too late into dreamshare for him to even be having natural dreams _at all_ anymore, hasn’t had one since before he left the Army, his last was about _clowns_ for pete’s sake — for decades. It’s about Eames… only it isn’t, really.

This one is foggy around the edges, the ceiling is arched and everything echos like the inside of a cave. The gun in his hand is old in style, feels familiar in his grip, but it’s practically new, he doesn’t know how he can tell, but he totally can, just _knows_ , the way he knows that the muzzle is pointed at a man’s knee, even though he’s staring at the man’s face instead.

The man Arthur’s standing over is bleeding from the corner of his mouth, red dripping into the brown of his goatee, and clutching at his ribs. He’s staring up at Arthur — well, really it’s more like glaring, baleful, through one eye; there’s a patch over the other, looks like an injury long healed.

As Arthur watches, the man at his feet opens his mouth, and in a voice that could almost be Eames’s gruff fake, says “ _No_ ,” almost like a challenge.

Arthur feels a messy surge of frustration, anger, and disappointment, that he doesn’t understand — but he can tell, at least, that none of it shows on his face.

He pulls the trigger.

Not-Eames doesn’t scream, though it looks like it takes a herculean act of self-discipline to not do so. He turns his head away.

“You should have come with me, Viktor,” Arthur hears himself say, barely recognizes that it’s his voice, that the words came from him — wouldn’t, actually, except he feels his lips moving. Not-Eames doesn’t look back at him.

Arthur wakes up just as he starts to walk away.

* * *

Arthur spends far too much time, over the next three years, staring at Eames and thinking about that dream. It’s unprofessional, but he can’t seem to help himself.

Eames notices, of course he does — he’s been staring back, after all, the way he seems to watch everything he finds interesting (which, in turn, is something Arthur only knows because of his own staring; Eames is far more subtle than Arthur’s ever bothered even trying to be). Once, early on, it leads Eames to say to Arthur, “You’re an odd one, aren’t you, darling.” 

Arthur resists the urge to sneer. He’s never sneered a day in his life, he’s certainly _not_ going to start now, however instinctive it feels.

* * *

Their third job after inception, Ariadne has apparently restocked her never-ending list of questions.

“Don’t any of you ever miss dreaming?” she asks, chin in her hand. “I mean, properly dreaming. Natural dreams.”

“Not me,” says Arthur.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” says Eames, and he sounds amused. “You probably dreamt about taking your suits to the dry cleaners.”

“Wouldn’t those be nightmares?” Ariadne asks, with a tiny smile.

“Only if the establishment is not on my shortlist of approved cleaners,” Arthur says.

Ariadne laughs, a little, but the banter has the desired effect of making her not ask what Arthur _did_ dream about.

—

“You’re wrong, you know.”

Arthur says it while they’re in the middle of post-job clean-up, the mark still out cold on the couch in his own office.

Eames raises his eyebrows. “Oh, am I. How so?”

“When I used to dream,” says Arthur, coiling the lines of the PASIV with practiced motions, “it was like I was reliving things I hadn’t actually done.”

“What, you mean deja vu?” Eames gives him an unimpressed look. “That happens to everyone. Especially in our line of work, I’d imagine.”

Arthur’s not sure what makes him do it, but he finds himself muttering, “Well, unless I actually _was_ a ginrunner’s hired gun during Prohibition...”

Eames’s expression stays skeptical for a moment, but gradually, it evens out, and his eyes narrow.

“It’s the strangest thing, but you actually seem to be telling the truth.”

“Yes,” says Arthur, clicking the PASIV closed and standing. “I know.”

He walks away while Eames is still visibly thinking about that.

* * *

The next job, Eames shows up back in the Austrian thug persona Arthur remembers from their first meeting.

Though normally, Arthur has no trouble understanding any specific accent as well as another, he finds it taking him an extra moment to parse all of Eames’s comments as actual words during the initial planning meeting. Especially if Arthur’s not looking directly at Eames while he listens.

Cobb gives Arthur a strange look after the meeting. Arthur hopes that it was just because he’d spent the majority of the meeting being even more unsubtle about staring at Eames than usual, and not an indication of any new suspicion. But Cobb doesn’t ask, so Arthur doesn’t have to tell, either way.

—

“Didn’t you get the latest report from his therapist, Cobb?” Arthur asks, without looking up from his computer, on the seventh of their eight allotted research days, before they have to get down to planning and practicing in earnest.

“I brought it in earlier,” Cobb replies. “I put it on your desk.”

“No. On mine,” Eames says, from the direction of his desk, on the other side of the warehouse.

“Oh, sorry,” says Cobb. There’s the sound of a chair scraping against the floor. “I guess I’ll just—”

A file intrudes on Arthur’s field of vision, accompanied by a gruff, “Here.”

“Thank you, Viktor,” Arthur says, taking the file and shifting it to the other side of his desk with one hand, while he uses the other to scroll to the end of the webpage (he hates when the marks have _blogs_ , god, he has to read through the entire thing, comments and all, and it’s invariable _unbearable_ ; it’s as if all the common sense has gone out of the world).

He feels eyes on him, a few moments later, and looks up. Eames is standing by the desk, arm still raised from handing Arthur the files. A desk away, Cobb is squinting at them, his mouth a confused twist.

“What?”

“Nothing,” says Eames, too quickly. His accent is gone.

Cobb keeps squinting, even after Eames has retreated to his side of the warehouse.

With difficulty, Arthur twitches it off, and goes back to reading.

Arthur keeps feeling those eyes on him almost constantly, for the next several hours, but every time he looks up, Eames is looking at the research for the forge, like he ought to be.

—

The job goes down the way they planned for it to — except for one tiny hiccup that’s less a hiccup than an entirely aberrant moment when Arthur finds himself _lost_ within his own dreamscape.

There’s a cornfield, where he didn’t mean one to be, and there are two projections in it, standing by a hole — a grave-sized hole — in the ground. One is the not-Eames that dream-Arthur had called Viktor, and shot in the knee. Standing, shovel in his hands, the only similarity he bears to Eames is the air of danger kept in a back pocket. Next to him is… Well. Someone with the lean lines and crisp wardrobe of Arthur himself, with the addition of glasses and a watch tucked into the pocket of his vest, chain and lenses gleaming brightly in the moonlight.

They look at him, his projections, for several long heartbeats. Then the one with the glasses nods at him, and they both turn back to the hole.

It’s almost a minute before Arthur can bring himself to turn away.

He nearly runs into Eames, standing just behind him and giving him a look Arthur can’t read at all.

“Come on,” is all Eames says, though, just before he turns and walks away.

Arthur follows him, because it was his idea to go this direction in the first place, anyway.

Other than _that_ , though, the job goes the way it was supposed to.

After, Eames stares outright at Arthur until the split-up. Arthur does his best to pretend not to have noticed.

* * *

Their next job, Cobb brings in Eames, even though they don’t need a forger.

“Is there a particular reason for hiring _him_?” Arthur asks.

“He asked to be brought on,” Cobb says.

Arthur frowns, unsettled.

Cobb squints. “Do you have a problem with him being here?”

“No,” Arthur says. “Forget I said anything.”

—

The first morning of the job, and it looks like Arthur might have been wrong about there being no problem.

Eames is staring at Arthur across the empty office they’re using for staging. He’s _been_ staring, all morning.

They’re the only ones in the room.

“What,” Arthur says, finally snapping and dropping his preliminary research, “is going on?”

Eames crosses to just in front of Arthur’s desk, sets something in the very center of it.

“Mordecai Heller,” he says.

The hair on the back of Arthur’s neck stands on end. “Excuse me?”

“That’s who you think you are.”

Arthur looks down, sees a profile like he draws up on their marks, open to a wanted poster from the ‘20s.

The picture is the same as the face of Arthur’s spectacled, pocket-watched projection.

A cold rush goes through Arthur, and he just stares. For once, he has no idea what to do with new information.

“Your hallucinatory alter-ego was a real person.”

**Author's Note:**

> I've marked this as finished, since it is — but only because I'm having trouble sorting out the finer points of the plot I want to use for a longer fic in this crossover universe. If I ever manage to make it passably cohesive, I'll be writing that as well. (Full disclosure: I really just want human!Mordecai!Arthur having adventures with Eames.)
> 
> For reference:
> 
>   * The characters in _Lackadaisy_ are all cats, which is basically the best thing ever, but for the purpose of this fic I chose to go with the interpretation that the cats are stand-ins for humans. [Here](http://lackadaisy.foxprints.com/exhibit.php?exhibitid=184) is a picture of the Lackadaisy creator's human!Mordecai. Seeing it again after ogling screenshots of Arthur for hours might have unduly influenced my decision to actually write this.
>   * [St. Louis Union Station](http://www.stlouisunionstation.com/) really exists, as does the hotel within/attached to it. (The bit about their service being bad if you check in wearing a Cubs hat, however, I made up — my apologies to any Cubs fans and/or employees of said hotel.)
>   * Mr Mistoffelees is a character from T.S. Eliot's _Old Possum's Book Of Practical Cats _. Other than being clever and crafty, he has nothing to do with this story. Well, and I couldn't figure out what to title this, but I wanted to involve cats _somehow_ , and T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, MO. It was like it was meant to be. ;-) __
> 



End file.
